GET INVOLVED

Several area surf shops are serving as collection points for the expanded polystyrene foam that Waste to Waves is working to recycle into surfboards. The foam must be EPS foam, and cannot be contaminated with food waste. That means no foam coffee cups or lunch plates. The ideal foam is the stuff that comes packaged with a new computer, refrigerator or similar appliance.

The program is meant to serve individual consumers and surfers. Businesses with larger amount of foam can contact Sustainable Surf at foam@sustainablesurf.org.If you’re a business that wants to recycle larger quantities of foam, you can contact …

Drop the foam at these Orange County locations:

Republik of Kalifornia: 219 S. El Camino Real, San Clemente

Rip Curl: 3801 South El Camino Real, San Clemente

T. Patterson Surf Shop: 1409 N. El Camino Real, San Clemente

Surfside Sports: 233 East 17th street, Costa Mesa

Foam E-Z: 6455 Industry Way, Westminster

Visit www.wastetowaves.org for more information.

Foam dust floats, lingers, in the air in Timmy Patterson's San Clemente shaping room as he sands the square edges off a custom surfboard.

The dust is a rare example of waste in what the nonprofit Sustainable Surf wants to make a waste-free process: shaping surfboards.

Normally, making a new surfboard is wasteful and resource-intensive.

The polyurethane foam at the core of the vast majority of surfboards can't be easily recycled. It and other foam products find their way into landfills, or, discouragingly for surfers, the ocean. Wildlife may feed on it, it may wash up on Southern California beaches, or it may concentrate in massive spinning gyres – trash islands composed of plastics and other materials that don't break down – in oceans worldwide.

It's a big problem, but Sustainable Surf, which aims to make protect the oceans by transforming surf culture and industry through its new Waste to Waves program that recycles expanded polystyrene foam (EPS) into surfboards, is focusing on just one slice of that trash ecosystem, and hoping to motivate average, everyday surfers to recycle.

"It's the icon of sustainability. We're trying to create this vision of surfing as a sustainable industry," said Sustainable Surf co-founder Kevin Whilden.

HOW IT WORKS

The idea is pretty simple: take packaging foam – the stuff that comes in the box when you buy a TV or a microwave – and recycle it into surfboards.

Doing that is a little more daunting. The foam has to be collected, and transported. But transporting feather-light foam in diesel trucks is inefficient. The foam must be kept clean to avoid contaminating the recycled product. The new surfboards have to perform just as well as ones made of virgin foam. And surfboard shapers have to be convinced the recycled foam shapes just as well.

Patterson, who owns a surf shop a few blocks from his shaping room in San Clemente, is already sold. He's been helping Sustainable Surf and its partners perfect the foam composition of the recycled surfboards, which is now 60 percent recycled foam, rather than 100 percent. Patterson, who has shaped more than 40,000 surfboards and does nearly 10 a day for customers as far away as Japan, says the recycled surfboard blanks shape just like the regular ones. Surfers have a particular interest in the ocean's health.

"They're the ones who are out there in the water. They're the ones who get sick. So they really care about cleaning up the environment," Patterson said.

Patterson's shop is also a collection point for the people to drop off foam. That's the beginning of a long recycling process.

Marko Foam, which is a foam manufacturer and one of Sustainable Surf's partners in the program, picks up the foam from surf shops at the same time it's dropping off new surfboard blanks. Marko Foam trucks the foam to its facility in Irvine, where the foam is crushed, melted at 143 degrees Celsius into a sludge and hardened into bricks, to be transported.

The reason the foam needs to be densified? Foam is made of upwards of 90 to 98 percent air, and hauling that much empty space is not fuel efficient. But a brick of condensed Styrofoam is worth as much as 25 or 40 cents a pound and might weigh 40 pounds. A full semi truck of the condensed bricks is 42,000 pounds, near the maximum haul of a semi truck, and is worth more than $10,000.

Marko transports the bricks to its facility in Salt Lake City, where it's made into a granular substance. That's the raw material that Marko Foam uses to mold any of its many foam products. Bags of the stuff are then hauled back to Irvine, where it's molded into surfboards for shapers like Patterson.

Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson works with Sustainable Surf to make boards from recycled foam. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson shapes a board made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson prepares a router machine to make the initial shape for a board made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the companies Sustainable Surf and Marko Foam Products to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Patterson prepares a router to make the initial shape for a recycled-foam board. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson talks about his craft and about using recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from recycled foam.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Patterson is working with Sustainable Surf and its partners to perfect the composition of the foam used to make the surfboards.Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson places a blank made from recycled foam into a shaping machine at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Patterson places a recycled-foam blank into a shaping machine. ... Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson adjusts a board made from recycled foam in a shaping machine at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from recycled foam.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
... adjusts a board in the shaping machine ... Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson shapes a board made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
... shapes a board ... Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson shapes a board made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
... and continues shaping with another tool. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson shapes a board made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Patterson works on a board made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Surfboard shaper Timmy Patterson holds two boards made from recycled foam at his shop in San Clemente. On the left is just the recycled foam core, on the right is a finished recycled foam board with a bamboo inlay. Patterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Patterson holds two boards made from recycled foam. On the left is the recycled foam core. On the right is a finished recycled board with a bamboo inlay. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Ty Peterson talks about the process that his company Marko Foam Products uses to recycle foam into surfboards at his shop in Irvine. Peterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make the boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Ty Peterson, president of of Marko Foam in Irvine, talks about his foam-recycling business: "We never really went after the consumer. Our focus was industrial." Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Steve Gann places a block of recycled foam into a router to make an 8' 6" SUP (stand-up paddleboard) at Marko Foam Products in Irvine. The company is working with Sustainable Surf to make the boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Steve Gann places a block of recycled foam into a router to make an 8 foot, 6 inch stand-up paddleboard at Marko Foam. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Densified foam comes out of a machine at Marko Foam Products in Irvine. The machine takes foam at about 1 1/2 lpounds per cubic foot and the turns it into the material coming out about 40 pounds per cubic foot. Marko is working with Sustainable Surf to make the surfboards from the recycled material. The goo hardens into a block that is then sent to another facility in Utah.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Densified foam comes out of a machine at Marko Foam. The goo hardens into a block that is sent to another facility in Utah. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Blocks of densified foam stack up as a worker feeds foam into a machine at Marko Foam Products in Irvine. The machine takes foam at about 1 1/2 pounds per cubic foot and the turns it into the block of material at about 40 pounds per cubic foot. The blocks are then sent to a facility in Utah that turns it back into the lighter foam. Marko is working with Sustainable Surf to make the surfboards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Blocks of densified foam are stacked at Marko Foam. Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register
Ty Peterson with some of the surfboard blanks, some from recycled foam and some not, at Marko Foam Products in Irvine. Peterson is working with the company Sustainable Surf to make the boards from the recycled material.

PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Kevin Whilden is co-founder of Sustainable Surf, whose Waste to Waves program aims to "create this vision of surfing as a sustainable industry." Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register

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